Voyage Beginnings

My next Patreon-only short story will be posted up on Wednesday 9th November, and it’s called ‘The Final Voyage of the Smiling Henry’. If you’re a fan of William Hope Hodgson or The Lost World type vibes, then this might be just your thing. You can sign up for as little as one dollar to get access to these strange stories that are going free and experimenting with all sorts of genres.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

The captain of the Fair Arthur, upon return to the port of New Bristol, reported forthwith to Worthington Hall, mindful of the money she had been promised for the news she could bring.

There she described a sighting of vast spewing volcanoes, visible to the naked eye as erupting gouts of red upon the horizon, and took her payment in exchange for their position marked upon a chart of the Northern Ocean before departing for the nearest tavern.

Later that evening Isabella switched her attention back and forth from the chart to her mother’s notes, within the peace of the family home’s library. The cracked spines of many leather tomes surrounded her, and each recorded some adventure from the line of Worthington. Here was the very desk where her mother had sat and speculated upon the cooling of lava to form crenulated rocks; it was as the latest Lady Worthington had claimed ten years ago. The map and co-ordinates she had guessed upon matched those drawn in the captain’s own shaky, sea-aged hand.

Just for extra flavour, here’s the trailer for The Land That Time Forgot. Yep, that’s definitely an influence on this story too…